Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Of Saaremaa: Fairy Tale Land

Many colleagues have joked about the Baltic countryside being kind of a Tolkienesque land, with lots of pleasant countrysides with ridiculously charming old barns and stone houses and tiny villages with a pub and people dutifully minding their flower gardens. Not that the Latvians are short, but there is a Hobbit-shire quality to a lot of it. But Saaremaa beats it all. It has all of the above, but the centerpiece of the main city of Kuressaare is this castle. Germany may have castles that look more like the kind of place a Disney princess might live, but Kuressaare features this stout looking fortress, original from the mid-1300's, has a cool portcullis and a moat and looks like the kind of place that would be easy to defend against orc attacks.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.